Good morning, RVA! It's 74 °F, and, yes, highs are back up in the burning-hot 90s. If you can make it past this weekend, through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, and to this coming Wednesday, you should get to relax in some cooler temperatures. I think we can do it!
Water cooler
John Reid Blackwell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that it's getting harder to find same-day COVID-19 tests. This matches with what I've heard anecdotally, too: multiple-hour waits at urgent care providers, sold out at-home tests, and booked-up testing appointments at pharmacies. If you need to get tested for work or travel reasons, I'd budget a couple of extra days to make that happen. And, remember, you can always walk up to one of the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts' free community testing events held a couple time a week across the region.
Also COVID-related and also in the RTD, Jessica Nocera reports that SOL passing rates dropped during the pandemic. I don't think this is at all surprising, and I mostly link to it because I'm really interested in how we'll have to asterisk 2020 and 2021 in all sorts of datasets. Test scores are just the top of the asterisk iceberg!
Richmond BizSense's Jonathan Spiers has the details on this fun new plan from Virginia Union University: VUU is "expanding its academic offerings to include a hospitality management program that’s planned to be anchored with a new, student-run hotel next to the Carver neighborhood." The current plans will either raze or convert the cool brutalist C.D. King Hall on the southwest corner of Lombardy and Leigh into the hotel. Y'all know how I feel about weird, old, brutal buildings, and I really hope they can find some way to incorporate the existing structure. You should tap through and read the whole thing, because Spiers has more info on VUU's hospitality management program and some details on the University's other development projects in the area. I am pretty excited about the future of the Lombardy corridor—anchored at the southern end by the 12-story building going in at Broad, VUU in the middle, and Chamberlayne to the north. Could be cool!
Whittney Evans at VPM reports on the (small) rise in the number of children hospitalized in Virginia for eating too many edibles. First, don't leave your edible laying around if you have kids in the house! Second, I'm really interested in all of these other things Virginia Poison Control gets calls about kids eating: 43 calls for children eating marijuana edibles, 37 calls for detergent ingestion (Tide Pods), and 60 calls about battery ingestion. Small children are so charming, but they are always putting everything in their mouth and trying to find new ways to terrify their families.
The Wason Center at CNU released a general election poll yesterday that shows T-Mac 2.0 leading his republican challenger by nine points in the gubernatorial race, which is outside the margin of error. At this moment in time, Democrats lead down the entire ballot and "among likely voters on the generic ballot test for the House of Delegates." Obviously nothing is a done deal until the votes are counted (and not even then lately), but I will allow myself to unclench slightly.
This morning's longread
The Lithium Mine Versus the Wildflower
I think we'll have to make hard choices like this—endangered wildflower or lithium mine—more and more as we continue to remain complacent about climate change.
Lithium is abundant in the Earth’s crust, but there is rarely enough in one place to go to the trouble of digging it up. The element is most common near ancient volcanoes where rock has been formed by slow-cooling magma. In some places, the lithium from those volcanic rocks leaches out and finds its way into the water table, forming a brine that can be pumped from the ground and evaporated, leaving lithium-bearing compounds behind. Until recently, Australian rocks and Andean brines have supplied enough lithium to satisfy most of the world’s needs. But the scramble to shift from fossil fuels has inspired a search closer to home. The US has the fourth-largest lithium deposits in the world, most of them in Nevada, but only one active brine operation, located in the state’s Clayton Valley, immediately to the east of Rhyolite Ridge. In both places, the lithium is the product of explosive volcanic eruptions that took place about 6 million years ago.
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